


Prize

by Deepdarkwaters



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: BAMF Roxy, F/M, Late Night Conversations, Saving the World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-09
Updated: 2016-10-09
Packaged: 2018-08-20 12:07:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8248198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/pseuds/Deepdarkwaters
Summary: "If I get this wrong, an evil maniac dumps an airborne zombie pathogen in the middle of Paris at rush hour. There's no cure. Everybody on Earth dies."
"Yes."
"If I get this right – when I get this right," she corrects herself, stern and determined, then she gives Merlin that odd, thoughtful look again, and slowly the glinting little smile creeps back into her eyes. "Perhaps you'll let me take you out for dinner when I get home."





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Regency](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Regency/gifts).



> For Regency! [Tumblr kiss fic meme](http://deepdarkwaters.tumblr.com/post/150702058341/another-kiss-meme) #9, 'We might die tomorrow' kiss. Hope you enjoy x

"Good evening," Merlin says when he sees Roxy in the library doorway. Then he glances at the old grandfather clock opposite the fireplace – 1:04 a.m. – and corrects himself. "Good morning, rather."

She smiles at that, tugging the burgundy satin sleeves of her pyjama shirt down over her hands as if she's cold or nervous. Merlin cocks his head at the other armchair and she sits, bending her legs and wrapping her arms around her shins, resting her chin in the cupid's bow dip of her knees. "Morning," she echoes, and stares into the crackling fire for a bit. "You're up late."

"I don't sleep much."

"No." She doesn't move any part of herself to look at him then except for her eyes, bright and penetrating. "I trained myself into polyphasic sleep while I was at uni. Seemed like such a waste of time, trying to schedule eight hours a night to just lie around when there was so much to do. I ended up getting by on six half-hour naps a day. Thriving, in fact."

"But not any more."

"Not in this job. When I needed sleep I _needed_ sleep, naptime was like flicking a lightswitch. I can't afford that loss of control any more."

The fire in the unlit room makes her blonde hair look auburn. Merlin's not used to seeing it loose around her shoulders like this, except when she's all dressed up on a mission occasionally and he happens to see her on someone's monitor as he's passing through the handlers' department. She's taken to the sharp suits as much as anyone – become a bit of an addict about it all, to Harry's delight, and now spends half her downtime helping him pester the designers for new cuts and patterns while Eggsy wears his polyester monstrosities and a mutinous look in protest at his lover and his best friend getting on better with each other than either of them do with him. Strange now to see her so unguarded. Strange to be wearing the same pyjamas as her. There's something a bit weird and silly and boarding-school about it all: uniforms, sneaking round at night, secret conversations in an empty wing while everyone else works or sleeps on other floors.

A little harder to come by decent whisky in boarding schools, though, or at least that's Merlin's memory of Fettes. He pours a splash in the glass he emptied a little while ago and holds it out for her, saying, "I'd have brought two glasses if I knew I'd be entertaining company."

"Thank you." She drinks the way a whisky from 1926 deserves to be drunk – slow, savouring it, cherishing the unveiling flavours and the feel of them on her tongue. Merlin's aware he's watching her and aware how rude that is, but she's watching him as well so it seems like it'd be ruder to look away, even when she taps her glass down lightly on the side table next to her armchair and swipes the lingering wet of the drink from her lower lip with her thumb, sucking it into her mouth as though she doesn't want to waste even a trace of it. There's a funny sort of look on her face, thoughtful and curious, and abruptly she says, "I'm not nervous about tomorrow, if you're worried."

"You've never given me cause to worry about anything you do." Which is true. Over the last three years she's caught everything Kingsman's thrown at her with tremendous skill and boundless courage and just enough panache to delight people without overstepping the show-off mark the way her predecessor so often did. She's been captured and tortured, had the skin peeled off her forearm in strips by a madman who wanted to know who she was working for, and never spilled a word. She's scaled the crumbling side of a burning building to retrieve documents her handler had given up on. There's nobody in the entire organisation who's gone farther, literally, than her – into space, single-handedly taking down the satellite that allowed Eggsy and Merlin to dispatch Valentine before he caused too much damage. Billions of lives saved, dangerous people eliminated, bombs dismantled, trafficking rings torn apart. And on top of all that, she's somehow found the time to finish the engineering PhD her Kingsman training interrupted and publish two books, one about the seismic resiliency of buildings which Merlin devoured before bed for a week instead of his usual le Carré spy bumf, and one she laughingly called _awful, awful Austen-ripoff romance full of every stupid cliché you can think of_ , which she banged out while she was bored in hospital recovering from her torture ordeal and dedicated to Harry, recovering in the bed next to hers, to distract him from complaining about his itchy stitches.

Roxy tilts her head, resting her cheek against her knees now instead of her chin and looking at him sideways. "You're not nervous?"

"Hard to be nervous about anything at one in the morning in front of a roaring fire."

"Rubbish," she says, though she's smiling. "One in the morning is when I do my very best fretting."

"But not about the mission."

"Not about the mission," Roxy echoes, and swallows the last of her whisky. She keeps the tumbler in her hand, dangling from her fingertips, watching the firelight reflected in all its crystal facets. Without looking up, she says, "This is the best-planned mission I've ever had. We know this, all of us, inside out and upside down. We've been through every possible setback and found solutions for all of them, just in case. I'm healthier, physically and mentally, than I've ever been. I couldn't possibly be more ready for anything than I am for this job."

Silently Merlin holds his hand out, and Roxy passes him the glass so he can pour again. He takes a long, smoky swallow, and gives it back to her to finish off.

"How many times have you saved the world?" she asks. "You, personally."

The question is unexpected and for a moment he's taken aback, fumbling for words, but there's a sort of openness about her expression that he finds reassuring. Makes him believe she's really not nervous much more than her spoken insistence did.

"Three," he says eventually. "It's not usually this global scale threat, it's smaller things. Human trafficking, crooked government officials, localised terrorism. But there was V-Day, of course, though that was teamwork. I took down the computer system of a man who was threatening to make every electronic device on the planet malfunction at once."

"Sounds like science fiction," Roxy says suspiciously, and Merlin shrugs his shoulders.

"Maybe so, but I didn't want to keep any of what I saw even for research or reference. Too dangerous for it to exist at all."

"And the third?"

"Killed someone who wouldn't listen to me telling him 'no' on his plans to bomb several agitated countries near the end of the Cold War."

"I forget you were an agent sometimes. I bet you were brilliant." She smiles at him, soft and fond and lovely. It's a side of her he knows very few people get to see. Eggsy, of course; Harry sometimes, both because he and Eggsy are joined at the hip now and because he and Roxy became unexpectedly fond of one another during their time imprisoned together in hospital; the two handlers she works with most often; and Merlin. Even Percival isn't close to her, really – he was too busy to find a recruit and yanked her name at random from a list of champion kickboxers that happened to be in a local newspaper story that morning. Ever since the beginning of her training, throughout winning the job and saving the world and proving herself time and time and time again, she's been learning to cultivate this Lancelot persona as someone cold and focused simply for self-preservation in an environment that's still now, after everything, pushing back against her. She doesn't drop her guard like this for just anyone, and every time she does there's just this little, fleeting moment when Merlin forgets to breathe.

"Adequate. Not nearly as brilliant as you."

"Flattery."

"Honesty."

"Alright," she says quietly, pressing her smile against her knees so Merlin can't see it on her mouth, only the gleam of it in her eyes until it fades away. "If I get this wrong, an evil maniac dumps an airborne zombie pathogen in the middle of Paris at rush hour. There's no cure. Everybody on Earth dies."

"Yes."

"If I get this right – _when_ I get this right," she corrects herself, stern and determined, then she gives Merlin that odd, thoughtful look again, and slowly the glinting little smile creeps back into her eyes. "Perhaps you'll let me take you out for dinner when I get home."

The lurching feeling in his stomach at that isn't one of surprise so much as a long-held hope stoked by two years of carefully casual mutual flirting finally coming to a head. "When you save the world," he says, miraculously steady, "I believe convention says you can have anything you want," and Roxy hides her face in her knees and hands and laughs, giddy and breathless like she can't quite believe they're having this conversation in this way either.

"I'm less demanding of my prizes than Eggsy, I promise."

"I don't know, we could certainly negotiate if that's what you wanted."

"Oh god," she mumbles, and gives Merlin a glare that's more amusement than anything as she's unfurling her legs and setting her bare feet down on the rug. "I'm neither drunk nor awake enough for this mental image, thank you. I think I'll go to bed. Long day tomorrow. I mean, you know..." She trails off, and quietly adds with a crooked little smile, "Hopefully."

And there's so much about this, whatever this is, him and her, that feels like a complicated, intricate minefield even now, that his hand doesn't quite follow the instructions from his brain in time to reach for hers as she passes his chair – though maybe she sees the aborted movement, because he hears the soft footsteps faltering on the floorboards, and then a lingering, tingling brush of long blonde hair falling either side of his face when Roxy leans over the back of his armchair and kisses the top of his head.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she murmurs. He can feel her words, the breath of them touching his skin the way his fingers have flown up to rest on the hand she's braced on his shoulder. He feels the slow slide of her satin pyjama sleeve dragging slick and warm over his collarbone and throat, an awkward, clumsy sort of hug, and she kisses him again. "Wear a bow tie. I'll take you somewhere posh. Fill you with champagne and claim my prize."

He doesn't wish her good luck because she doesn't need it, but he kisses the bump of her wristbone and the back of her hand and the ragged burn scar on her knuckles from some old mission mishap, and maybe that's sort of the same thing.


End file.
